I do that sometimes. Soldiering in my twenties made me used to irregular sleep patterns. It also promoted arthritis. If I am very tired after a day of work I may go to sleep for a few hours relatively early in the night and be up for a two or three hours before going abed again. If I stay in bed for more than four hours at a stretch I am likely to have painfully stiff joints when I get up.
This has been my pattern for decades. It was a great relief to read about this two sleep thing a few months blsck. Made me feel a bit less eccentric.
I go to bed often as early as 9-9:30pm.
Wake at 2-2:30 am, refreshed.
Go downstairs, boil milk and add Ovatine.
I read, greatly enjoying the solitude whilst quaffing my geezer beverage.
I often also do 20-30 push-ups or the plank for the tension-relaxation effect which really helps to get sleep 2 happening.
If was even nicer when I had a cat.
I do not go on the internet.
The trick is to never toss and turn in bed; never to fume while looking at the clock; never to panic about not getting enough sleep.
You should get another cat. Or several cats.
It may explain why I like my afternoon catnaps.
Actually, siesta is still practiced in countries between the equinoxes.
In the cooler countries it is not as conductive to lay down in warm breeze so much.
Make that cool breeze.
In addition to two daily sleep periods, up until age 40 I was on an 8 day a week schedule, each day being 21 hours. I didn’t miss the 3 hours, but the extra “Freeday” allowed me an extra day to get ahead of everyone else.
Same here… I used to think I hurt my work day, but it is really nice for that few hours in-between, and I am not tired when it’s work time.
Im wondering if this is the actual normal sleep pattern caused by the evolutionary success of getting up to stoke the fire and scare away the local predators. Ive had it for years always getting up for a few hours in the middle of the night and never sleeping past 6am unless ill. maybe 5 hrs max a night , every night. diabetic , yes. but not sure which is the cause and which is the effect. married for 30 years the alternative activity presented there doesnt figure into it much anymore
This fits with what sleep researchers found. The first four hours of sleep is used by the brain to catalog and organize the new information acquired that day and the second four hours is the body healing itself.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this written up. It does seem to be more physiological and in keeping with the changes in the sun and the middle of the night rise of the moon.
Certainly, anyone who’s had to stand sentry duty can identify with the concept.
Before the advent of electrical light it made more sense to match one’s rhythms to the rising and setting of the sun and moon.
yup, been doing this for years. Thought I was unusual, apparently not.
Easier to do when self employed with no set hours.
Guess I’ve been doing this myself for a while. When I was younger I tried to totally eliminate sleep as a useless waste of time but not very successfully. All that happened was that I’d just fall asleep in lectures or be snoozing at my desk in the library.
The important thing about sleep is getting enough stage 4 sleep as absence of this phase of sleep for an extended period of time results in chronic pain syndromes. The current dogma in sleep science is that one needs a long enough period in bed sleeping continually for one to achieve stage 4 sleep. It would be interesting to look at bimodal sleepers via polysomnography to determine if they got their stage 4 sleep despite what is considered to be a shorter than expected period to get there.
I’ve got fairly irregular sleep patterns as, after an intellectually stimulating day during one of my hospital shifts, I often won’t get to sleep until about 03:00 and have to be up at 07:00. After a few days on this cycle, I’ll come home and have my cat curl up on me and then fall asleep immediately and wake up after midnight, do things for a few hours and then go to sleep till the morning. Find that dreams are the most interesting in this type of sleep pattern. When I’m on call, I often find out the next day what orders I’ve given on various patients and find it bizarre that I can practice medicine while asleep. Occasionally I’ll be asked by the nurses if I’m awake and that’s when I’m in the middle of a dream when awakened by my pager (fortunately nurses can tell when the investigations I order are just too strange).
Like most people who can claim they get by on 4 hours of sleep/night, I’ve been a big fan of naps at various points during the day and, in undergraduate university, lectures were a favored time to nap. Only problem with having naps during the day in class with REM periods is that sometimes I wasn’t sure if what I learned was a dream or the content of a lecture. At least the dreams made the lectures more interesting like a molecular biology lecture dealing with RNA transport through nuclear pores where I remember being on a motorcycle with a load of RNA on the back racing through mountain passes in Switzerland as quickly as possible around curves to deliver the RNA before it decomposed.
I read about this first in “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” by A. Roger Ekirch. It is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) history of night-time in pre-industrial societies around the world, based on amazing historical and literary research.
I have been sleeping like that for a few years now. I put it down to aging. I often wake at 1 am and read for about an hour and a half and then go back to bed and sleep again. good to see I am not alone with this pattern.
If I was retired, like some of you, I would probably have three sleeps a night; and two more during the day! Anyway, I never sleep through the night, waking up at least two or three times, being a very light sleeper. When I’m out, I’m out, with lots of dreams.
As for the darker ages, before widespread electrical lighting, two sleeps make sense given it gets dark, in the winter, before 5pm. What else are you going to do. Having sex between the first and second sleep appeals to me too.
I have a feeling all of us posting are “old white guys”
I’m not.
Have never had an uninterrupted 8 hour sleep since I was captivated by radio in my mid-teens. First sleep is ~ 4 hours, I then waken to listen to radio for a couple of hours then drift back into a second sleep with vivid technicolour dreams.
Really miss Wolfman Jack & Art Bell – Their radio voices were pure gold.
I prefer George Noory. He doesn’t interview people that pretend they are rocks. Or the conspiracy kook Hoagland
I do this quite a lot, actually.
I do that sometimes. Soldiering in my twenties made me used to irregular sleep patterns. It also promoted arthritis. If I am very tired after a day of work I may go to sleep for a few hours relatively early in the night and be up for a two or three hours before going abed again. If I stay in bed for more than four hours at a stretch I am likely to have painfully stiff joints when I get up.
This has been my pattern for decades. It was a great relief to read about this two sleep thing a few months blsck. Made me feel a bit less eccentric.
I go to bed often as early as 9-9:30pm.
Wake at 2-2:30 am, refreshed.
Go downstairs, boil milk and add Ovatine.
I read, greatly enjoying the solitude whilst quaffing my geezer beverage.
I often also do 20-30 push-ups or the plank for the tension-relaxation effect which really helps to get sleep 2 happening.
If was even nicer when I had a cat.
I do not go on the internet.
The trick is to never toss and turn in bed; never to fume while looking at the clock; never to panic about not getting enough sleep.
You should get another cat. Or several cats.
It may explain why I like my afternoon catnaps.
Actually, siesta is still practiced in countries between the equinoxes.
In the cooler countries it is not as conductive to lay down in warm breeze so much.
Make that cool breeze.
In addition to two daily sleep periods, up until age 40 I was on an 8 day a week schedule, each day being 21 hours. I didn’t miss the 3 hours, but the extra “Freeday” allowed me an extra day to get ahead of everyone else.
Same here… I used to think I hurt my work day, but it is really nice for that few hours in-between, and I am not tired when it’s work time.
Im wondering if this is the actual normal sleep pattern caused by the evolutionary success of getting up to stoke the fire and scare away the local predators. Ive had it for years always getting up for a few hours in the middle of the night and never sleeping past 6am unless ill. maybe 5 hrs max a night , every night. diabetic , yes. but not sure which is the cause and which is the effect. married for 30 years the alternative activity presented there doesnt figure into it much anymore
This fits with what sleep researchers found. The first four hours of sleep is used by the brain to catalog and organize the new information acquired that day and the second four hours is the body healing itself.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this written up. It does seem to be more physiological and in keeping with the changes in the sun and the middle of the night rise of the moon.
Certainly, anyone who’s had to stand sentry duty can identify with the concept.
Before the advent of electrical light it made more sense to match one’s rhythms to the rising and setting of the sun and moon.
yup, been doing this for years. Thought I was unusual, apparently not.
Easier to do when self employed with no set hours.
Guess I’ve been doing this myself for a while. When I was younger I tried to totally eliminate sleep as a useless waste of time but not very successfully. All that happened was that I’d just fall asleep in lectures or be snoozing at my desk in the library.
The important thing about sleep is getting enough stage 4 sleep as absence of this phase of sleep for an extended period of time results in chronic pain syndromes. The current dogma in sleep science is that one needs a long enough period in bed sleeping continually for one to achieve stage 4 sleep. It would be interesting to look at bimodal sleepers via polysomnography to determine if they got their stage 4 sleep despite what is considered to be a shorter than expected period to get there.
I’ve got fairly irregular sleep patterns as, after an intellectually stimulating day during one of my hospital shifts, I often won’t get to sleep until about 03:00 and have to be up at 07:00. After a few days on this cycle, I’ll come home and have my cat curl up on me and then fall asleep immediately and wake up after midnight, do things for a few hours and then go to sleep till the morning. Find that dreams are the most interesting in this type of sleep pattern. When I’m on call, I often find out the next day what orders I’ve given on various patients and find it bizarre that I can practice medicine while asleep. Occasionally I’ll be asked by the nurses if I’m awake and that’s when I’m in the middle of a dream when awakened by my pager (fortunately nurses can tell when the investigations I order are just too strange).
Like most people who can claim they get by on 4 hours of sleep/night, I’ve been a big fan of naps at various points during the day and, in undergraduate university, lectures were a favored time to nap. Only problem with having naps during the day in class with REM periods is that sometimes I wasn’t sure if what I learned was a dream or the content of a lecture. At least the dreams made the lectures more interesting like a molecular biology lecture dealing with RNA transport through nuclear pores where I remember being on a motorcycle with a load of RNA on the back racing through mountain passes in Switzerland as quickly as possible around curves to deliver the RNA before it decomposed.
I read about this first in “At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past” by A. Roger Ekirch. It is an exhaustive (and sometimes exhausting) history of night-time in pre-industrial societies around the world, based on amazing historical and literary research.
I have been sleeping like that for a few years now. I put it down to aging. I often wake at 1 am and read for about an hour and a half and then go back to bed and sleep again. good to see I am not alone with this pattern.
If I was retired, like some of you, I would probably have three sleeps a night; and two more during the day! Anyway, I never sleep through the night, waking up at least two or three times, being a very light sleeper. When I’m out, I’m out, with lots of dreams.
As for the darker ages, before widespread electrical lighting, two sleeps make sense given it gets dark, in the winter, before 5pm. What else are you going to do. Having sex between the first and second sleep appeals to me too.
I have a feeling all of us posting are “old white guys”
I’m not.
Have never had an uninterrupted 8 hour sleep since I was captivated by radio in my mid-teens. First sleep is ~ 4 hours, I then waken to listen to radio for a couple of hours then drift back into a second sleep with vivid technicolour dreams.
Really miss Wolfman Jack & Art Bell – Their radio voices were pure gold.
I prefer George Noory. He doesn’t interview people that pretend they are rocks. Or the conspiracy kook Hoagland